Fighting for water safe to drink / Blacks in East Texas say they're victims of environmental racism

Ralph Blumenthal, New York Times

Published 4:00 am, Sunday, July 23, 2006

2006-07-23 04:00:00 PDT DeBerry, Texas -- Frank and Earnestene Roberson no longer need to drive the 23 miles to a Wal-Mart near Shreveport, La., for a safe drink of water.

Instead, it is delivered to them in 5-gallon jugs, courtesy of the Environmental Protection Agency.

But they and neighbors in this historically black enclave in the East Texas oilfields seem no closer to being able to drink, cook or bathe safely from their own wells since the EPA found the groundwater here contaminated with pollutants that include arsenic, benzene, lead and mercury.

Calling themselves victims of environmental racism, community members filed suit in federal court in June, accusing the Texas Railroad Commission, which regulates the state's oil and gas industry, of failing to enforce safety regulations and of "intentionally giving citizens false information based on their race and economic status."

The commission said it had yet to receive formal notice of the lawsuit and had no comment on it.

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But almost two decades after Earnestene Roberson first began complaining, setting off years of inconclusive state inquiries, the agency says it is now moving against a large oilfield services company that deposited wastes at a nearby disposal site that has since been closed.

The inspector general of the EPA is also concluding a separate investigation into the handling of the problem.

With 30,000 oilfield waste disposal sites throughout Texas, there is no clear evidence that the community here was singled out for dumping, although residents said it followed a pattern, documented by the EPA, of pollution hazards that disproportionately affect minorities.

They said that pleas for help, including letters to President Bush, were bounced from one agency to another, and that their treatment stood in sharp contrast to a $1.7 million cleanup last summer by the railroad commission in Manvel, a largely white suburb of Houston.

"They worked very fast and were very diligent," said Mayor Delores Martin of Manvel.

Resentment is dying hard among the Robersons and their relatives on County Road 329. They are the descendants of a black settler, George Adams, who paid $279 and a mule for 40 acres here in 1911.

"This is America? It looks worse than the Third World," said the Rev. David Hudson, the Robersons' nephew. Hudson, a retired California radio and television station manager, pointed out where wells had been plugged and where an elderly relative died last year in a home cut off from running water.

"I look at this as poisoning the only source of groundwater," he said, "as tantamount to lynching."

The tangled history of the disposal site, which began around 1980 as a deep injection well for saltwater wastes from drilling, makes apportioning blame difficult. Since then, according to records of the railroad commission, the disposal site has been under the control of six different operators. It was last operated by Basic Energy Services of Midland, which describes itself on its Web site as the nation's third-largest contractor servicing oil and gas wells and used open holding tanks to store waste for pumping to a second injection well nearby.

The commission said Basic Energy had operated the tanks for more than two years without a permit, resulting in a demand by Panola County in 2003 that the disposal line under the county road be shut down. The commission has been asking the company to track any migration of pollution.

"Basic has been slow to respond to our requests," said John Tintera, the commission's assistant director for site remediation.

Ken Huseman, the president and chief executive of Basic Energy, would not respond to specific questions but said in a statement that the company's goal was to have no adverse impact on the environment, and that it would be responsive to the railroad commission.

But Hudson, who runs a local family ministry and teaches at the Church of the Living God, said the commission had close ties to the industry and had denied that DeBerry had a problem.

Hudson said he had directed his appeals, in vain, to the sole black member of the commission, Michael L. Williams, a former assistant secretary of education for civil rights at the U.S. Department of Education. A spokeswoman said Williams could not comment on the DeBerry case because it was "still in enforcement."

Hudson recently settled a state civil lawsuit against Basic Energy under terms that remain confidential. "We didn't get enough to get shoelaces," he said.

The lawsuit was settled, he said, after his lawyer found that the railroad commission had fined one of the site's operators, Falco S&D Inc. of Shreveport, $27,747 in 2000 for having illegally dumped about 3,000 barrels of chemical waste there. That made it difficult to determine Basic Energy's liability, Hudson said.

The EPA has acknowledged a potential danger in the groundwater.

"We found that the groundwater in the Panola County community is indeed contaminated with several substances," wrote Johnny D. Ross, project manager in the inspector general's office in a January memo. Those substances, Ross wrote, "pose a threat to human health and the environment."

In 2003, the railroad commission found in residents' wells benzene, barium, arsenic, cadmium, lead and mercury "at concentrations exceeding primary drinking water standards," said Peter Pope, a specialist with the commission.

The problems go back at least to 1987 when, railroad commission records show, Earnestene Roberson began complaining of spillovers from the injection well. Her well water was discoloring her bathtub, she reported, "and it causes bad stomach problems when consumed."

The commission took samples in October 1996, finding "no contamination in the Robersons' household supply water that can be attributed to oilfield sources."

By April 2003, however, commission tests found barium and chloride above maximum contaminant levels in Hudson's well, along with traces of two oilfield chemicals. The source was unclear. He plugged his well and moved to another house connected to the Bethany-Panola Public Water System.

Last year, Hudson said he obtained a $375,000 federal loan to connect the community to the same municipal supply, but the water company, concerned that the residents would be unable to repay the money, rejected the application.

The EPA arranged last August for the delivery of bottled water to the Robersons and others with tainted wells. Some residents, however, have been less fortunate. Maggie Golden, a 73-year-old cousin of Hudson's mother, had been receiving water piped in by Basic Energy to replace her hand-pumped spring-fed system which had been contaminated, said her sister, Mary Lee Kellum, a Houston teacher.

"Then all of a sudden they cut it off," Kellum said.

Hudson said he appealed to Basic Energy, which restored the water for about a month but then shut it off after the disposal site was closed down. They drank bottled water, but to bathe, Kellum said, "we'd go to the church and borrow water in big barrels and heat it up. The pioneer days were back again."

Her sister died in the house on June 17, 2005, Kellum said. "She just went to sleep during the night," she said. "It was stressful stuff. She said, 'I'm tired of struggling.' "